


The Land, the Sea and the Sky

by neverfaraway



Series: String Theory [3]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Angst, Bill Denbrough is a Mess, Bisexual Bill Denbrough, Bisexual Male Character, Everybody Lives, Except Stan again, First Time, Fix-It, M/M, Mike Hanlon Deserves Nice Things, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-14
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:27:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24719764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverfaraway/pseuds/neverfaraway
Summary: Mike makes it to Massachusetts before he realises his compass only points west.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon
Series: String Theory [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1701523
Comments: 7
Kudos: 50





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in the same fix-it universe as my Reddie fics ’String Theory’ and ’The Only Living Boy In New York’, but you don’t need to have read either of them first.
> 
> Listen to the playlist for this story here: [Cicadas and Gulls – a Hanbrough playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1GREfiT2OrCpMplIbHrgBR?si=aIoDcAa5Squ5tuOeDHR3MQ)

“Florida,” he said, and the Losers assumed he meant the sun on white sand and the taste of oranges fresh off the tree. What he meant was the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky, nothing else between him and the horizon. He’d seen a photograph of the old lighthouse at the tip of Key Biscayne in an aged _Reader’s Digest_ he found in the pile of paper his grandpa kept for kindling and he’d been dreaming about it ever since. He wondered what it would feel like to curl his bare toes into the damp sand at the water’s edge; none of the books he borrowed from the library had managed to tell him that. 

At thirteen, his whole world had been the unbroken ocean of pasture surrounding his grandpa’s farm. He'd never set foot beyond the Derry town limits. In ninth grade he devoured _Moby Dick_ in three days, propped on the barn roof where his grandpa wouldn’t find him. The words lit fires right inside him. He wanted, desperately, to look out upon the vast Atlantic and understand what Ishmael had seen. He wished he had the facility with language to put his own thoughts on paper, the way Herman Melville did. He had his own _damp, drizzly November of my soul_ in him somewhere, it was just that no one had ever looked at Mike - solid, dependable Mike, whose words came out twice as slow as Eddie's, because he never wanted what fell out of his mouth to be something he hadn’t taken the time to consider - and thought for a second he had worlds stored up inside him, an ocean crashing right inside his head. 

There's never been anything but home, not for him, and setting out ought to feel momentous, like he ought to pause on the bridge over the Penobscot and tell his non-existent companion that he’ll be the furthest he’s ever been from home, if only he takes one more step. In the end, it’s as simple as slinging his bag in the back of his beat-up Volkswagen and setting his foot to the pedal. It’s as unassuming a leave-taking as anyone could have imagined. There’s no one left in Derry to note Mike Hanlon’s leaving; there’s no tug in his guts as he crosses the town line telling him he ought to go back. There’s no unfinished business, just the car and the open road.

The last time he attempted to escape, he’d just turned 30. He got as far as the Penobscot, knuckles white on the wheel, and then sat at the side of the road for what felt like hours as the afternoon trickled away and it started to get dark. A choice lay before him, as it had every other time: go, and forget; stay, and continue to shoulder the burden of remembrance. There’d been nothing for him to run towards - even if he set out with an aim in mind, he’d forget it by the time he got to New Hampshire, and then where would he be but homeless and friendless in the ass-end of New England. He’d almost chosen that. He liked to kid himself he’d almost made it, but the reality was that he’d driven to the bridge already knowing he’d turn right back around and drive all the way home. If he’d been trying to pretend he was showing some sort of resistance by going there, pushing at the membrane of the bubble, he hadn’t even convinced himself. 

Now, with the afternoon sun setting behind him, casting long shadows, he pulls over just inside the state line and rolls the window far enough that he can lean out and take a single photo of the sign that informs him that Maine is “worth a visit; worth a lifetime.” 

_I think me and the State of Maine might have to agree to disagree_ , he types in the group chat.

He leaves the window down and props one elbow on the sill. The sun is low in the sky and it catches the side mirror; when he glances into it he sees his own face illuminated and wearing an expression he can’t remember seeing there before. 

On the seat next to him his phone lights up with responses almost immediately, but he’s happy to leave it there unattended for a while. A week ago he existed in a state of nervous anticipation so severe that the sound of his phone vibrating against worn leather would have had him grabbing at it for news of the others, but now he knows they’re out there, and that they won’t forget him again, and he has all the time in the world.

* * *

When he pulls off the highway into a roadside parking lot, there are fifteen message notifications. He flicks through them, warmth in his chest right beneath his sternum. Richie has sent the photo straight back, annotated obscenely, and the sound of his own laughter is such a surprise that Mike laughs some more. It feels, he’s thinking for the fifth time in as many days, so good to have friends who remember him.

When he gets out of the car, the one thing he’d wanted, when he’d looked into his mind’s eye and seen Florida, is stretched out before him from one end of the horizon to the other. The palette is muted and the place is empty; nothing stands between Mike and the sea but an expanse of pallid sand. It's cold: too damn cold, in Mike’s opinion, but it’s New Hampshire in September and this windswept stretch of beach is still the most thrilling thing Mike’s seen in a whole long time, so it’s worth the wind cutting through his clothes and making him shiver.

He takes another picture. He figures he’ll take a picture every time he’s someplace like this: someplace he never expected to see, and yet here he is, alive and getting further away from Derry with every mile along the highway. He figures he’ll put them all in a scrapbook, or stick them to the walls in… well, wherever he ends up living. For a moment he’d pictured his photographs pinned to the walls of the room above the library, just like the collection of documents Richie had unkindly termed his “crazy wall”. He takes a deep breath and reconfigures that particular part of his mental landscape. It won’t be the room above the library. He doesn’t know, yet, where it will be, but that, as a start, is good enough for now.

When it gets too cold for the fact he’s wearing a sports jacket and no hat, he climbs back in the car and drives. Sunset will be upon him, soon, and he wants to get to a motel in time to find someplace to have dinner. He’s spent forty years waiting to get his hands on an honest-to-god lobster roll, and even if he has to settle for diner burger and fries for now, the possibilities opened up by being over the state line are, frankly, making his mouth water when he thinks about it for too long. Key lime pie. That’s what he should have said, when Bev had softly asked him what there was for him in Florida, just before she and Ben drove away. Sand, sea, and as much genuine key lime pie as a man could consume before he keeled over and died.

As he pulls into the parking lot at the Harbour Motor Court, his phone lights up again. This time it’s Bill, separate from the group chat: _Good for you, Mikey. I hope Florida is everything you wanted. Remember, there’s a bed for you in California, if you’re out this way x_

Mike frowns: there’s a finality to it, like Bill’s taking his leave. Like he’s not expecting to hear from Mike between here and Florida, or perhaps even here and California, where Bill knows he has no intention of going, and there’s just something about it that burrows its way beneath the contentment Mike’s been feeling with the window down and the cold New England air freezing his fingers where they were wrapped around the steering wheel. If he’s trying to pretend to himself that it doesn’t mean more than any of the other messages, that it isn’t important that Bill sent this to him specifically, his tone gentle and familiar, then he’s not very convincing about that, either.

 _I’m in New Hampshire_ , he types, because if he allows Bill to make this retreat, it’ll feel like there’s a country between them again, and that’s not something he’s prepared to allow. _Took your advice: Catch-22._

In the diner across the road from the motel, he takes out the book he’s been carrying in his bag and sets it on the table beside the cutlery. He literally cannot remember the last time he read fiction without feeling guilty for the time wasted away from his research. While he waits for his chicken parmesan, he opens it up to the first page and starts to read: _It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain, he fell madly in love with him._

* * *

Bill had come with him, the day he decided to start clearing out the rooms above the library. Eddie had still been in the hospital in Bangor, and Ben and Bev were running support for Richie, who’d spent three full days refusing to leave his side long enough to shower. Mike had been feeling surplus to requirements, but not in a bad way; in a way that meant there were enough of them, now, for him to set down some of the burden of responsibility and have someone else pick it back up.

“You want company?” Bill had asked, and Mike, sensing a similar sort of feeling in him, had acquiesced. 

At first Bill floated round the room peering into drawers, picking up artefacts and flicking through sheafs of paper, while Mike hovered anxiously over the box he was trying to fill with notebooks. This was exactly why he hadn’t intended on having company while packing. Having the evidence of how he’s spent the past twenty seven years spread out here for Bill’s perusal, and Bill with nothing more pressing to do than lift the ancient fertility statue out of its box and raise his eyebrows at Mike in pantomime astonishment, was setting anxious needles under his skin. 

“That’s his ceremonial staff,” he said, wishing Bill didn’t still have the ability to make him blush. “It’s symbolic."

“You b-bet it is. Got anymore of that stuff you roofied me with?"

Mike glanced at him. “The Shokopiwah only gave me a little.”

“Gave you…?”

“I didn’t steal it from them. Not that time, anyway. Fuck, I’m sorry, Bill. Pennywise was right. I fucked up so badly.”

“H-hey,” said Bill. “That’s bullshit. You just wanted what we all wanted.”

“And nearly got you all killed."

“B-bullshit,” Bill repeated. “If it wasn’t for you… You’re not a m-madman, Mikey, you’re the b-best of us. Our lighthouse keeper.”

Mike turned away, tucking a notebook on top of a stack of photographs from the site of the Ironworks, taken just before they sank the foundations for the Mall. Bill approached carefully and Mike wished he’d keep his distance, a safe expanse of boxes between the pair of them, so that he didn’t have to deal with Bill’s sincerity.

“Maybe you’re mad, too,” he said, wishing it sounded like a joke. “Maybe we all are.”

“I think, after everything, it’d be astonishing if we weren’t. All this stuff - you did a d-damn good job.”

Bill laid a hand on Mike’s shoulder, and Mike let it rest there, comforting, for a long moment, the pair of them casting a somber eye over the photographs, at the sewer entrance marked off with yellow tape, its entrance a gaping mouth in the midst of the churned up earth and old girders sticking out of the ground like the ribs of shipwrecks.

“Can you help me with this?” Mike said eventually, because dwelling on it further would do neither of them any good, indicating the other boxes he’d stacked on the desk, packed with notebooks and copied pages busy with pencilled annotations. 

“What is it?”

“Everything. My evidence, my research."

“What’re you gonna do with it all?”

“Follow me.”

Out the back of the library, down the fire escape and hidden behind the tiny parking lot, was a scrap of ground dominated by a sprawling butterfly bush that was nearly finished flowering, its last few purple blooms hanging sadly over a patch of cracked concrete. Beside it, a scorched metal drum had been set on end. Bill followed him down the steps and hefted his box between his hands.

“We’re going to trashcan fire your research?”

“No use for it, now, and I’m sure as hell not taking it all with me. Don’t want anyone finding it; some things should stay dead.”

Mike emptied the box he was carrying, watching diagrams and annotated Xeroxed sheets flutter into the barrel. He waited for Bill to say something, to raise an objection on grounds of the years of Mike’s life represented by the pages he was discarding, for Bill to draw attention to the fact that this was all Mike’s years on this earth had amounted to.

“Huh,” said Bill, and then dumped the contents of his box in there, too. 

Mike struck a match and dropped it into the barrel, waited until there were flames licking up the sides of it. It was too reminiscent of the ritual, he knew it was, but he couldn’t think of another way of making sure the worst - the most disturbing - of his work was destroyed. 

“Well,” said Bill. Mike glanced at him, found him staring at the flames that were beginning to dart towards the sky as they consumed one of the notebooks. “This is…”

“I know, I’m sorry. You don’t have to -“

“I was going to say cathartic,” Bill finished, mildly. “How many more boxes?”

They burned seven boxes of notes in total, feeding the paper into the fire sheaf by sheaf, after the first couple had burned through. Mike realised Bill was right: the cleansing power of fire was something that came up in mythology and folklore again and again, but seeing the pages crumble into ash and embers in front of him, he finally understood it. 

“What happened to the farm?” Bill said, out of nowhere, when they’d fed the final folder into the flames and were watching curls of pale smoke rise through the blooms of the butterfly bush.

Mike took a moment to reply. “Grandpa died; I was nineteen, didn’t know the first thing about cattle ranching, growing corn. He’d tried, but I spent all my time here, I didn’t have time for learning about the business. I was already working in the library; developers wanted the land, and I wanted to sell. Think they gave me a good price. It’s all in the bank, in savings bonds. I started living here, and I guess I just never left.”

“You hated the farm,” Bill said, as though he was only just remembering that one day when Mike was fourteen and Grandpa finally lost his temper, made Mike press the bolt gun between the eyes of a surplus steer and pull the trigger.

“I hated what it made me responsible for. Grandpa wasn’t wrong; I loved those animals, but I didn’t have what it took to make the right decisions for ‘em.”

He remembered, and he knew Bill was remembering, too, riding his bike across town, tears making it difficult to see where he was going, and finding his way to Bill’s house nonetheless. He remembered knocking on Bill’s door, Bill’s mom ushering him inside, and the way Bill had stared at him for a moment, terrified, before taking him upstairs to his room and letting him cry until his throat ached and he couldn’t cry any more.

“I read _Dune_ to you until you fell asleep,” Bill said, his mouth a sad curve. 

It wasn’t just that: Mike remembered Bill’s low voice murmuring to him through the darkness once his bedroom light was turned off and Mike was lying beneath the spare comforter Bill’s mom had found for him, and that no one acknowledged must have been Georgie’s, once upon a time. She’d called his grandpa and told him Mike was welcome to spend the night, and somehow persuaded him it was a good idea. Grandpa didn’t like Mike to be in town after dark. It was the only time Mike had ever come close to blurting out the other things he held inside him: the fact he wished he could go to college; the fact he thought Bill was the best person he’d ever known and ever would know; the fact he sometimes still felt like Ishmael on the Pequod, alone amongst the Losers even as they chased down their whale.

“You said I was a good person, because I didn’t want the calves to suffer.”

“You remember that?"

“I never forgot,” Mike said, and he meant it lightly, but the way Bill’s face fell in on itself told him he was unsuccessful.

“Mikey,” Bill said. He was so sympathetic, so understanding, and Mike couldn’t bear to be patronised, not then, with all their memories swirling in the thick air between them. 

“It’s fine,” he said. “Honestly; I don’t - I don’t want any of you feeling sorry for me. It was a choice I made for myself.”

“So that the rest of us could live." 

“And you have,” Mike said, smiling. “I don’t regret it.”

Bill’s hand has been tucked into the pocket of his jeans, but now he leaned over to catch Mike’s fingers in his own. He did it gently, tentatively, like he expected to be shaken loose. It was still so strange, the feel of another person in his space, that Mike shivered. It was an involuntary reaction and he supposed he ought to be ashamed of the way his starved body had been curving towards all of them over the past few days, like a sunflower turning towards the sun.

“How are we supposed to thank you?” Bill asked.

Mike blanched and tugged his hand out of reach. “I don’t think gratitude's in order for the shit I’ve pulled this week.”

“Y’gave us twenty-seven years, Mikey,” Bill said, because he always was a dog with a bone, and Mike should have remembered that once Bill thought he was onto something he never let up, not ever. “You kept us all safe from It for twenty-seven years.”

He sounded soft and impressed, like Mike had achieved something he found remarkable. It made the same bells ring inside Mike as it always had. Bill was the leader, their captain, and they all lived for his recognition. It made Mike feel foolish, because hero-worship was excusable in a bunch of twelve-year-olds; not so becoming in people their age, who should have known better.

When they trudged back up the stairs, Mike’s breath caught in his throat. The sun had sunk low in the sky and spilled through the attic window, lighting up the room in tones of molten honey. Motes of dust were suspended in it, shimmering, giving the room the appearance of being under an enchantment.

Bill cut the air in two, dispelling the illusion. He walked over to the window and Mike followed, because that was what Mike had always done. Below them, the canal caught the sun and seemed lit up with fire; the railroad bridge was looming, still, but that kinder light made it protective rather than sinister. Mike ached for what this town could have been, if It had never existed. 

Bill’s gaze drifted over the bridge and the filthy water. The Ferris wheel was stilled following the cancellation of the Festival. His mouth twisted unhappily and Mike put a hand on his shoulder, wanting to wipe the sadness clean away.

“Feels strange being here and the place feeling so much less ugly. I felt it when we drove back. It’s like all the anger that used to fuel the whole town, all the hatred and the fear, is just…”

“Burning away like fog in the sunshine,” Mike said, flushing when Bill smiled at him. 

“Exactly. Fog in the sunshine.” Bill’s serious eyes were on Mike’s face, and Mike had no idea what he was searching for there. It was making him feel like the barrel fire had caught him with its embers, after all, and he was smouldering, on the verge of catching light. “You always did know exactly what to say.”

Mike would never have said that was the case. Back when they were kids, he’d been the strong, silent type; he knew that was how the others saw him, and he leaned into it because it was nice to have a niche to fit himself into, a way to belong. He wondered whether Bill was referring to the times he used to pedal his bike out to the farm, the summer after It, and sit with Mike on the barn roof, or in the corn field, or lean on a fence watching the cows, until eventually he’d say, in a tight, unhappy voice: “ _I n-needed to get out of the h-house_.” He'd always wondered why Bill didn’t go to Stan or Eddie, his two real best friends, but he hadn’t said anything, and Bill had stayed there with him until the sun set, or until the cows needed milking, or until he had to go home for his dinner, whichever came first. 

“I’m so glad you came back,” he said, suddenly, the words falling out of him before he was able to stop them. 

Bill's eyes were on Mike’s face, still, and he must have been able to discern Mike’s most shameful secret: that when he’d made that phone call to Bill, when he’d called the others, he hadn’t felt scared, or sorry, or anything else he ought to have felt. He’d just been looking forward to having his friends back. 

“Even - despite - I know how it sounds, I’m just so glad you came back. I’m sorry, Bill.”

Bill wrapped arms round him. “When I told Audra I was comin’ back,” he murmured, "I told her, ‘Mike Hanlon’s the finest kinda friend’. I couldn’t remember anything else, but I knew that much.”

Bill’s voice had coalesced into its old Maine accent and it made Mike want to burst right out in tears. They clung to one another, dust motes dancing above their heads, until Mike was certain Bill was holding him in a way that wasn’t precisely the way that friends held other friends. It had gone on too long, and Bill’s breath was too loud and urgent in his ear. It was the same queasy awareness he’d suffered four days ago, with Bill tripping out and panicking on the floor in front of him, his hand around Mike’s bicep, bringing him closer, closer; but, then it’d been the awareness of himself, his feelings, his sudden desire to press Bill down into the floorboards. Now, with Bill pulling away just enough to look up at him, one hand curled gently around his arm, it was much more terrifying.

“Mikey,” Bill murmured. “Is this okay?”

The correct response, of course, was no, not at all. Bill’s wedding ring was catching the sunlight and his fingertips were setting off sparks beneath Mike’s skin and he had no roadmap for what happened next. It was unfair of Bill to ask him, because surely Bill knew, surely Bill could tell how it had been for him for all these years. But Bill’s attention was on Mike alone, just as Mike had always wanted, so he nodded, regardless.

Bill kissed him like he was afraid to break something. He leaned in and nudged Mike’s lips, warm and undemanding, and it was so soft that Mike felt like one inopportune breath might blow him away. He let the sensations of the situation assail him gradually. Bill’s breath was warm on his cheek and he smelled like warm cologne and hospital hand sanitizer. The afternoon sun was warm where Bill’s hand was resting on his arm, and neither of them were moving. Bill’s chest, when Mike’s hand settled there, rose and fell minutely, as though this was the most calm Bill had been all week. He sighed a little, when Mike touched him, and Mike tilted his head and breathed it in. 

They stood there, the way they had in the sewers in that moment of victory and relief, for so long Mike lost count of the breaths he counted under his fingertips.

Bill kissed him again, his tongue a hot question along the closed line of Mike’s mouth. 

“Bill,” he said, mumbling it into the space between them, even as he let Bill’s clever fingers slide along his cheek, guiding him so that Bill could lick into his mouth. The slide of his tongue sparked a fire in Mike’s belly that he didn’t know how to put out. 

Bill withdrew, and Mike hated himself for the visceral, cheated feeling of deserving this, earning it, with his twenty-seven years of solitude. When he opened his eyes, Bill was staring at his mouth, his lips curved open in such a frank expression of desire that Mike knew he could have more from him, if he asked for it; Bill would never say no.

“Where’s this coming from?” he asked, while Bill’s hand folded itself around the curve of his neck, fingers warm points of pressure on the skin at the base of his skull. It made him want to arch into it like a cat. “It’s not unwelcome,” he added, lest Bill misunderstand him, “just - unexpected.”

Bill kissed him again, like he couldn’t help it, or didn’t want to, another soft press of lips. He breathed softly against Mike’s mouth. “I missed you,” he murmured, even as he drew away. He sounded wistful, almost amused, and Mike knew why; he got it. It was like having Bill there, in that space, in that circumstance, made their collision inevitable. It wasn't a hangover from when they were kids; much as Mike might have felt it, there wasn’t ever a hint of reciprocation from Bill and that’d been fine, because they’d all been a little bit in love with him, and it’d been almost a relief, to know that Mike was just like everybody else in that regard, nothing weird about him at all because he thought that Big Bill Denbrough riding around on that silver bike was the most magnificent thing he’d seen in years.

There was no pretence in Bill’s tone: he was as surprised by it as Mike, and there was no expectation between them that it meant more than what it was. Bill was going back to Los Angeles, and Mike was setting off for Florida, and they could have this mechanism by which to vent some of the jumble of euphoria and relief and love and nostalgia assailing them and move on from it unchanged. The human body responded in all manner of ways to things the brain had trouble cataloguing; it wouldn’t be the worst idea to let the thing unfold.

Mike kissed him again, let the unfamiliar sensation of another person’s mouth against his own settle under his skin, because it wasn’t another person, it was Bill, and that meant it was perfect just as it was. It didn’t require a what-next, just Bill’s mouth open and pliant against his, and both of them taking what they needed. 

“Thanks, Bill,” Mike murmured, eventually, because it was important to make sure Bill knew how grateful he was for this. It was anchoring him to himself in a way he hadn’t known he needed; he felt like he’d been an untethered balloon since Bill first answered his call six days ago, and suddenly he wasn’t quite so worried about floating away. 

“Anytime,” Bill said with a smile.

They slowly drew away from one another, Bill’s fingers slipping from his skin. There was a sweet tug behind Mike’s navel; if either of them had chosen to, they could have reached for one another and started a fire. But they hadn’t, and that heaviness, that sweetness had stayed with Mike for a long time after. 

“You want all the maps down, too?”

Mike had cast a glance around the room; the really incriminating documents all packed away and burned, just the map of Derry and the superimposed image of the historical town taped over it, a few pins highlighting places of interest that might be no more than historic sites to the untrained eye. 

“Nah, they can stay. I think we’re done.”

As he said it, Mike had rocked back on his heels and taken in the enormity of what he was about to do; stepping out of that room for the last time, closing a door on the only life he’d ever known. He wasn’t scared, precisely - didn’t think he’d ever be scared again, not really - and he wasn’t entirely excited, but then Bill put a hand on the small of his back, softly, like he was guiding him out of there, and Mike had breathed deep and allowed himself to take the lead. 

Out in the sunshine, Bill had looked older, like the dust had settled on him and left him grey around the temples. Fatigue seemed to have carved itself into the creases at the corners of his eyes. “When are you taking off?”

“I’ll see everyone gone first,” he’d replied. “Feels right.”

“My flight’s booked for tomorrow,” Bill said. “They’re saying they need me to be able to finish the film. I mean, fuck ‘em, they hate what I write, anyway -“

“Fuck ‘em,” Mike agreed, grinning, and Bill had laughed.

“You know, I’ve got a huge house,” he said, as they walked back to the Town House. “More rooms than I know what to do with. There’s one with your name on it, if you’re ever passing through California.”

“Well, if I’d be saving you from your lonely McMansion, I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks, again.”

“No problem,” Bill had said, mouth twisted up at the corner, and Mike had thought again how old he looked, his expression so soft and so tired.

* * *

He’d thought - hoped - that the nightmares would stop once It was dead. He’d lived so long with his parents’ voices in his head, the smell of charred wood and blistered paint, that he almost couldn’t imagine what might replace them. In the end, the nightmares don’t leave; they change, but they’re still there, waiting for him behind his eyelids, and he suspects they always will be. Nightmares are far more bearable when there’s little chance they’ll come true; it doesn’t mean his sleep improves. When he wakes the next morning, there’s sunlight streaming through the thin curtains and he doesn’t quite feel like he got a good night’s sleep.

There’s a message waiting for him: _Good choice - obviously the result of an impeccable recommendation. Keep me updated. x_

Mike sets off for Massachusetts with a smile on his face.


	2. Chapter 2

Before Richie and Eddie drove off in the direction of the airport and Mike closed the door to the rooms above the Library for the final time, he’d summoned the last of his courage and called Bill, already at home in California. 

"Go get it, Mikey," Bill said, when Mike confessed his yearning to see the sky. He’d sounded like he understood, so Mike had finally been able to say the words he’d held in reserve since he set eyes on Bill at the Jade of the Orient. He’d demurred the last time they were together, in the warm honey sun, because it'd felt like laying something burdensome at Bill’s door. When he finally let it out, with the phone clutched hard to his ear so he could hear the way Bill’s breath caught and wavered before he replied, Bill answered as though it were the easiest thing in the world: ‘ _Love you, too_ '. Mike had suddenly felt so calm, like the universe finally sat right upon its axis. Of course they loved one another: it was how he’d left things with Ben, too, the couple of times they’d spoken. If it signified something different, to say it to Bill, that needn't be Bill’s responsibility. 

“Mikey,” Bill says, when he calls a week later. “You hit Florida yet?”

The thing is, he hasn’t. It should have taken four days, flat out, to drive from Derry to Miami, and yet Mike’s still futzing around in upstate New York, drifting from motel to motel, taking himself on hikes through the Finger Lakes and up into the foothills of the Appalachians. It’s as though his head keeps saying _Florida_ while his heart insists on waiting for leaf-peeping season before it’ll let him venture any further south. Every evening he sets himself up at the motel room’s tiny desk with a notebook and a pen, and he’s finding that the ocean that’s been sloshing around in his head all these years is pouring right out of him.

“Took a detour through the Adirondacks,” he says. "How’s the book?”

“It’s coming. Finished another chapter; I was worried I might not be able to write like I used to, after everything, but it’s easier than ever."

“That’s good. What else is up?"

Bill’s quiet for a moment. Mike wonders whether he’s in his study: he described it, when Mike asked, so he can picture him there, leaning back in his chair, glasses dangling from the fingers of one hand, the late afternoon sun picking out the silver in his hair. “I told Audra about Beverly,” he says, sounding tired. _But not about you_ , Mike hears, in the pause that follows.

“How’d she take it?”

“Well, she’s still filming, so she’s not home. I think this’ll be the reason she asks for a divorce.”

“Shit, I’m sorry, Bill.”

“I’m not. Not as sorry as I ought to be. If you’d asked me a month ago, I’d have said we were happy. But now, after everything, it seems like it’s been a long time coming. I spoke to Eddie last night. He’s divorcing Myra; so it’s a full house. Me, him and Bev. It got us all good."

“Bill…”

Bill laughs softly. “This is why I called: you always sound so disapproving when I say things you don’t like. Keeps me on track.”

Silence hangs between them, fond and comfortable, while Mike racks his brains for something to distract Bill from how unhappy he sounds.

“I’m writing a novel,” he says, in the end.

“Wow,” says Bill. "Wow, Mikey, that’s fantastic. What kind of thing? Aiming higher than schlock horror, I hope -“

“Bill,” Mike chides. "I’m not sure; I suppose you’d call it a coming-of-age story.”

Bill huffs out a laugh. “S’ppose that’s what you’d call mine, too.”

“Listen,” Mike says, while there’s this warmth in his chest making him brave and foolhardy. “I’ve been reconsidering things. Florida. It’s a long way to go for some sunshine.”

“We got sunshine here,” Bill says. “More of it than I know what to do with.”

Mike smiles. “I can get a flight from Albany in two days.”

“Do it,” Bill says, impulsive, like he’s tossing out a challenge. “Come see me.”

Something within Mike is deeply appreciative of Bill ordering him around with that reckless edge in his voice. “Bill,” he says, meaning to issue a warning that Bill’s in danger of writing checks he has no intention of cashing.

“No expectations. Just come out and see me. It’s been… lonely. Which is strange, given that I couldn’t remember any of you three weeks ago.”

“Pretty crazy,” Mike agrees, because Bill’s put a name to the aimless tug in his chest when he thinks how far he is from the others. It’s as though, now they’ve been reunited, they’ve become the cardinal points on his compass. Maybe that’s what’s been going wrong while he's wandered around the Adirondacks feeling like he can’t remember how to find his way south.

“Listen, book a flight and let me know when to pick you up.”

“Sure,” Mike says, “okay.”

“I’ve got to go,” Bill says, sounding genuinely regretful. “Let me know about the flight. Love you, Mikey.”

“Yeah, you too.”

* * *

When Mike touches down at LAX, the part of him that will be forever New England marvels at its foreignness. He’s hit by a wall of damp heat, feels his shirt mould itself to his back as he drags his case out of the air-conditioned sanctuary of the terminal, and he realises he’s grinning, smiling nonsensically at the alien quality of Los Angeles in late September. Bill had told him to wait at the median between the lanes in front of the terminal, so he makes his way towards it, feeling like someone’s provincial cousin, emerging onto a concourse so busy he’s in danger of being swept up and into the street by the sheer volume of bodies. 

_It is the indigenous birds of a country that emphasise its foreignness far more than its people._ He read that in a nineteenth-century travel memoir which hadn’t, in itself, been particularly memorable, but he’d made a note of the quote because he’d thought Stan would find it amusing. He’s stored up years of anecdotes and funny tidbits from the newspaper, the kind of things that ought to be shared, written in birthday cards or turned into a private joke. Of course, Stan’s absence from the WhatsApp group is the cruelest joke, and he doubts the others would be thrilled to receive a lifetime’s worth of greetings cards, inscribed with Mike’s half of the imaginary conversation he’s been keeping up with each of them for the past twenty seven years.

He isn’t a hick, for goodness sake; he’d be willing to bet he’s travelled further inside the pages of a book than the average inhabitant of Derry has set foot in their lives. He just hopes Bill will be late, so he has chance to pack away his giddiness at being in Los Angeles. Also, he wants to take a photo of the first palm tree he’s ever seen in real life without Bill making fun of him for it.

“Mike!” 

He looks round as he’s putting his phone back in his pocket. Bill’s waving at him from a parked BMW that probably cost more than combined value of Mike’s worldly possessions. When Mike reaches him, Bill’s grinning, leaning on the passenger door. He glances upwards at the clear, cloudless sky. “You getting a shot of all that blue?”

Mike’s grinning despite himself, shaking his head. “The palms."

“Good to see you, man,” Bill says, pulling him into a hug. It isn’t the loose-limbed, back thumping bro-hug he’d expect if this were Ben or Richie and he lets himself settle into it, a nervous energy pulsing in the base of his spine, as Bill embraces him too warmly and for far too long.

* * *

The drive to Bill’s house takes a little over an hour and through some of the most austere, beautiful hill country Mike’s ever seen. He’s aware it probably looks like he’s hanging his head out the window like a dog, but there’s a parched, dusty quality to the air, some spice like eucalyptus that he keeps catching the scent of and then losing as they wind higher into the hills. He wants to chase it with his tongue.

“You okay there?” Bill asks him, half an hour in, and Mike grins at him so widely he thinks his face might tear clean in two.

“It’s… majestic,” he says, and Bill smiles in return, as though he loves the words that tumble out of Mike’s clumsy mouth. “It’s beautiful. That _lake_ -“

“Pretty sure you’ve seen a lake before.”

“When you’ve spent the last forty years in hiking distance of one single goddamn lake, you try not to find a whole new one this exciting.”

Bill laughs. “Fair. That’s fair.”

It’s as though Mike’s enthusiasm, which he'd thought he ought to try to mute, or pass off as something wry and laconic, is rubbing off on Bill. He’s cracked open and generous with his laughter, and he looks so comfortable with one tanned arm hanging out the driver’s window, his hair long and greying and brushing the back of his collar when he turns his head to glance at something Mike’s pointing out on the lake below them. 

The euphoria of being together again, of finding that the magic hasn’t worn off just yet, lasts until they pull up in front of the house. Bill, Mike reflects, had not been exaggerating its description for comic effect.

“Bill, this is…”

Bill winces, lifting Mike's bag out of the trunk. “Yeah, I know. It was a new thing, having money... Paul Newman lived here, briefly, in the 80s."

“Before or after he built the salad dressing empire?”

“You know, I don’t know.” He’s laughing at himself, eyes creased at the corners. "Come on, let me show you around.”

Mike’s amused to find that his favourite part of Bill’s ridiculous house is the study, as he expected, and that it’s exactly as Bill described. It’s simple: austere, even, in the context of the rest of the building, but the afternoon sun pours in through huge windows, illuminating a dark wood desk and a whole wall of bookshelves. Mike likes to think Bill’s been here, leaning against the panelling in the bay window, the sun on his face, while they’ve been talking these past couple of weeks. 

“That garden, man,” Mike says, gazing out on a lawn that looks like it might single-handedly be responsible for the California drought. 

“I know, I know. Audra wants to get someone in to dig it all out and replace it with cacti.”

Mike manages to avert his eyes a second too slow to miss the way Bill’s face shifts. His eyes flicker in Mike’s direction. There’s been nothing between them that couldn’t be explained away as the same desperation to climb inside one another’s lives again that he’s experienced with all of the Losers; Mike feels guilty, anyway.

“Is Audra-“

“Still filming,” Bill says, looking out over the garden. “You hungry? I’ll fix us something to eat.”

* * *

Mike perches on a barstool at the island counter in the centre of Bill’s pristine kitchen. He can’t help compare it to his gas stove and fold-down table at the Library. He wonders who does the cleaning, and how much Bill is paying them. 

“I’ve got wine,” Bill says, while he retrieves ingredients from the enormous fridge. “Good stuff, from a vineyard up the road. Omelet okay?”

Mike agrees to both, follows Bill’s instructions to retrieve wine glasses, pours them each a glass from the bottle Bill produces from the fridge. It’s too late for lunch, by anyone's standards, and Mike doesn’t usually drink in the afternoon. He barely drinks at all, outside of the occasional glass of warm Chardonnay at the Library’s annual stakeholder meeting. The wine hits the back of his throat, acid and cold, and he can feel it burning all the way down. _If you gotta crawl on your belly, the ice ain’t thick enough_ , his grandpa’s voice says, clear enough that Mike knows exactly what he’s deciding when he chooses to ignore it. 

The thing is, it’s strange, that they should all have scattered in the very particular pattern that they have. Eddie and Richie in LA, Ben and Bev in Boston, and now he and Bill in California, too. He’s not foolish enough to read everything he wants to into it, and he hates that Stan isn’t part of the constellation. He and Patricia ought to have been the fourth pin in the map. The wine tastes good, sharp and refreshing, even as he can feel it curling fingers made of cotton candy around the edges of all his thoughts. He ought to have eaten on the plane. Sitting at Bill’s kitchen island, watching him drop sliced peppers into a pan, it’s helping Mike pretend that he belongs here, that his visit is not the result of a knowing calculation on either of their parts.

* * *

After they’ve eaten - during which Bill’s accent has broadened and he’s laughed so hard he's nearly choked on his eggs, suddenly seeming bigger and bolder than allowed by the confines of Paul Newman’s immaculate kitchen, to Mike’s wine-smeared eyes - Bill has a couple of calls to take care of. He apologises, says he’s cleared the rest of the weekend, before disappearing in the direction of the study.

Mike wanders along the rows of bookshelves in the living room, getting a feel for the kind of books Bill’s been reading, all the years since Mike last lay on Bill's bedroom floor listening to his low voice narrating Paul Atreides’ meeting with the Reverend Mother. He gets the feeling all the books Bill really values are tucked way in the study, leaving the less well-thumbed novels and travel books here for public consumption. Mike knows that’s what he would do, what he tried to create in his attic above the library: surrounding himself with friends and mentors, making it dark and warm, a comforting womb-space. He finds his way back to the guest room where he left his travel bag, splashes some water on his face in the ensuite, then brings the novel he started reading on the plane back to the living room, folding himself into one of the armchairs, enjoying the fact the leather is cool through his damp shirt. 

He’s just reached the drowsy waking-dream state between reading and nodding off with his head propped on the back of the chair when Bill reappears. He looks tired around the eyes but he’s still smiling. Mike blinks himself awake and rights himself, failing not to blush when Bill laughs, low and long, as though the wine at lunch has left them both wading through molasses.

“What are you reading?” Bill asks, throwing himself into the other armchair. Mike flashes him the cover and Bill nods. “ _Neuromancer._ Nice. Read any of his others?”

Mike hasn’t. They talk books for a while: Bill tells him about the time he met Arthur C. Clarke and nearly yakked with nerves; Mike describes the frustration of running a public library in a town that still cares more about funding statues of Paul Bunyan than acquiring new book stock.

“You said you were writing?” Bill asks, eventually, when it’s grown dark enough outside that they’ve had to turn on lamps that drape the room in amber tones and shadows. It hangs between them, enough of an invitation that Mike can’t ignore it and pretend he misunderstood.

“Sure. It’s a recent development."

“How far have you got?”

“Far enough, I guess. You mind taking a look?”

“Only if you want me to,” Bill says, like he hadn’t been fishing for exactly this, and Mike stumbles off to the guest room to retrieve his notebook, flicking it open to the first page he’d scrawled at the desk in his room at the Harbour Motor Court. He hands it over without a word, refraining from asking Bill to go easy on him, and returns to his book while Bill reads.

Twenty minutes later, he glances over. Bill’s got his glasses perched on top of his head and he’s frowning at the sheaf of papers in his hand. 

“You got more?” 

Mike puts _Neuromancer_ down on the coffee table and shifts forward. “Uh - not yet. It’s all in here,” he says, tapping his temple.

“Well, I’m not going to give you feedback right now, you don’t need that,” Bill says, meeting his eyes. "Just get it down, all of it. Once you’ve got a manuscript I can call in a favour or two with my agent; it’s not really her genre, but she can put you in touch with the right people.”

“It’s good enough?”

“I’m not going to tell you it’s perfect, but it’s good.” 

Bill smiles, and Mike’s still feeling dehydrated and slow from the wine, that must be the reason his insides lurch as though they’re trying to stage a mutiny. “It’s good, Mikey."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for kudos and comments on the last chapter - the final chapter will be up next Sunday <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little later than promised, here's the final chapter - thank you for your feedback so far <3

A decent night’s sleep had evaded Mike in New Hampshire. In New York, he'd marched up and down a different mountain every day in the hope that exhaustion might accomplish what getting out of Derry hadn't. Drunk and stupid in California, he’s sure the nightmares will be exorcised by the honking, croaking, embarrassing noise Bill unleashes when Mike says something that has him screwing up his eyes and helpless with laughter, sprawled on his back on the living room floor. Bill makes that godawful noise until there are tears streaming down both their faces and Mike worries he might be in danger of yakking bourbon all over Bill’s expensive couch. When they stumble down the hallway an indeterminate time later, Bill slurs ‘ _G’night, Mikey,_ ’ and Mike staggers past him to hurl himself onto the bed in the guest bedroom, where he lands on sheets so smooth it’s like diving head-first into a swimming pool. The linens smell like they’ve been hung out to dry in the California sun. They smell like the shirt Bill was wearing when he hung onto Mike for too long outside the airport, so Mike buries his face between the pillows and falls asleep with a smile on his face. 

As usual, fighting to the surface of his dreams leaves him breathless. He’s weighed down by the sodden bulk of his clothes and he has to kick furiously to reach the patch of light he spies glinting far above his head. The water is clear and salt stings his eyes, but when his head breaks the surface he sees instead that it's turbid and foul. _Graywater_. He searches desperately for the light again, but he’s trapped in the darkness of the cavernous belly of the cistern. He shouts for help and his own voice sings it back to him. He blinks the filthy water from his eyes, tries to repel the debris bobbing towards him on the surface of the water, but his hand descends on sodden denim and cold, doughy flesh. Stan stares up at him with milky eyes, his face gray, ravaged by teeth and bound in a filthy bandage - 

Mike gasps awake, his heart hammering, fingers claws on the bedsheets, which have wrapped themselves around him like a shroud. He kicks them away and stumbles to the bathroom. His head’s throbbing dully and his eyes ache. 

The old Mike would have cleaned himself up and put on a pot of coffee, then spent the few hours before dawn at his desk, hunched over a research paper, poring over obscure academic arguments about dating in Native American archaeology; on the floor of Bill’s bathroom, Mike curses himself for a fool and heaves the consequences of too much bourbon into the toilet bowl. In Derry, on the rare nights he felt like he was getting somewhere with the research, he used to reward himself with a fresh mug of coffee just before the sun rose, pull out the stack of vinyl records he'd salvaged when the Librarian cleared out the music section in the late ‘90s, and watch the sun rise slowly over the Kenduskeag. He would have called it happiness, then: ’These Arms of Mine’ and a half hour’s peace and quiet, watching the world slide into waking. Dawn had been kind, letting Derry seem peaceful, before the sun broke over the edge of the railroad bridge and revealed the places that harboured memories of violence.

When he and Bill had finally called it a night, he'd left _Neuromancer_ in the living room, face-down on the arm of his chair. He rinses out his mouth then slips out into the darkness of the hallway, treading lightly, feeling vaguely foolish for creeping about like a burglar in an Ealing comedy.

He’s on his way back from retrieving the book when he realises he’s not the only one awake. The door to Bill’s study is closed, but a sliver of yellow light is visible beneath it. He can’t hear Bill moving about or listening to music: he imagines he’s at his desk, or ensconced in an armchair with a book of his own. He pauses, considering knocking softly and seeing if Bill wants company, but he’s hungover and unnerved by the memory of Stan’s sightless face. He goes back to his room and falls asleep an hour later with _Neuromancer_ splayed open on his chest. 

When the sun spills through the gap in the curtains, he’s gritty-eyed and disoriented. He takes a shower, longer than he would have allowed himself with the Library’s inconsistent water-pressure, feeling guilty when he recalls the dazzling hue of the thirsty lawn. By the time he clambers out and towels off, brushes his teeth, he’s regained something of his composure. Shaking off night-terrors and putting on his daytime disguise as a normal member of society is second nature; it’s just that he’d hoped it wouldn’t be necessary, in Bill’s house. 

He emerges into the kitchen and finds that Bill is also awake. He’s standing in front of the complicated coffee machine waiting for it to percolate and when Mike appears he jumps out of his skin, as though he’d momentarily forgotten there was anyone else with him in the house. Mike can’t help noticing there's damp hair curling at the collar of his shirt. He’s barefoot, and it fills Mike with tenderness. It’s on the tip of Mike’s tongue to apologise for sneaking up on him when Bill’s face breaks into a smile. 

“Mikey,” he says, sounding soft and tired. “Hey. You want coffee?”

“Thanks. You feeling okay?”

Bill shrugs, running a hand over his eyes. “Tired. Were you up in the night?”

“Couldn’t sleep - sorry, didn’t mean to disturb you, I came to grab my book. Were you working?”

“Yup. Couldn’t sleep,” Bill echoes, with a rueful smile. “Nightmares. Guess that hasn’t changed for either of us.”

“The sewers for you, too?” Mike asks, kicking himself even as Bill’s mouth twists unhappily. It’s been so long since Mike had anyone to share these things with and it’s making his mouth stupid.

“Not for me,” Bill says tightly, turning away to fill his cup with coffee. “It’s, uh. It’s usually the f-fair."

“Bill,” Mike says, wanting to cut out his own tongue. “Shit, I’m sorry.”

He reaches for Bill’s arm without thinking, as though it’s the natural thing to do in this situation to soothe the wounds his words have made. Bill leans into it and Mike watches the water drip onto the collar of his shirt as he sways in Mike’s direction, one hand clenched on the counter in front of him. 

“We are gonna need a f-fuck-ton of therapy,” Bill says, with a mirthless laugh. He turns, coffee cup in one hand, held against his chest like a shield. Mike retracts his recalcitrant hand, and he’s about to apologise again when Bill follows it, leaning into his space and looking up at him like there’s something he wants to say but isn’t sure how.

It’s the hazy afternoon in the room above the Library all over again, except this time Mike knows what to expect. Bill leans up and kisses him, syrupy and slow. The fingers of one hand loop themselves around Mike’s wrist on the counter, Bill’s thumb rubbing circles on the beating point of his pulse. This time the kiss swiftly turns loose and intimate as soon as Mike succumbs to it, bending to meet Bill halfway. Bill slips his tongue into Mike's mouth, and Mike savours the feeling of time slowing around them as they trade breath back and forth, Bill’s thumb drawing maddening circles on the inside of his wrist. All the blood in Mike’s body plummets, desire pooling in his stomach. He feels light-headed, sea-sick.

Bill’s still got his coffee in one hand, so Mike takes it from him and sets it on the counter behind him. With no idea how the notion comes to him, he takes Bill’s hand and brings it to his mouth, kissing his palm and the pad of flesh at the base of each finger. He kisses the callus on Bill’s middle finger where he’s spent years resting a pen. Bill watches him, dark-eyed, without saying a word. He’d like to wrap his lips around this finger, taste the ink on his skin, lick the words right out of him.

Bill kisses him again; this time his mouth’s open and hungry and Mike lets himself be consumed by it, until Bill pulls away, his breath short, eyes darting between Mike’s eyes and his mouth, like he’s struggling to articulate his desire.

“Can I-“ It’s not like Bill to hesitate, but Mike waits, feeling delirious. “I’d like to - I mean, tell me if you want me to stop, but just - let me -”

Bill plants his hands either side of Mike's hips, anchoring him against the edge of the kitchen island, and lowers himself awkwardly to his knees. There’s a furrow of concentration above the bridge of his nose and his lips are parted, swollen and pink. His tongue sweeps his lower lip, leaving it glistening.

Mike’s mouth is dry. “Bill, you don’t have to-“

“I want to. Is that okay?”

Mike nods and Bill flicks open the button of his jeans. He unzips him then sits back on his heels to take in the sight of Mike’s dick already hard inside his boxers. He says nothing, leans forward and rubs his face against it; Mike groans, unable to help himself as Bill nuzzles at him. When he glances down, he sees that Bill’s eyes are closed. He's mouthing at the base of Mike’s erection through his underwear and he’s got this look on his face like he’s grateful for it.

He watches, transfixed, as Bill urges his hips forward so he can push his jeans down to his knees. Then Bill hooks thumbs under the waistband of his boxers and tugs them down. Mike's cock bobs against his stomach, already welling at the tip.

“It’s been a while,” Bill says, looking up at him. That image, Bill on his knees, glancing at him from under his lashes, unfairly pretty and dark-eyed, has Mike’s stomach lurching, so turned on he feels sick with it, desperate. “Ever done this before?”

With no time for feeling embarrassed about all the years of his self-imposed celibacy, Mike shakes his head. Bill’s lips curl into a smile. He leans forward, wraps a hand around the base of Mike’s cock and takes him into his mouth in one hot, wet rush of sensation that has Mike’s hands clawing at the countertop behind him and his legs threatening to dump him in a heap on the kitchen floor. Bill cradles the head of Mike’s cock with the flat of his tongue, rocks forward on his knees to shuffle closer. He makes a noise in the back of his throat that Mike recognises as an expression of the same need that’s suddenly racing along every one of his nerves. He strokes at Bill’s hair, wanting to communicate that it’s mutual, this feeling of startled desperation, and Bill lets out another guttural sound, eyes fluttering closed so that all Mike can see is the shadow of his eyelashes against his flushed cheeks. 

It quickly becomes clear that Bill has an aim in mind: he’s taking Mike deep, letting him nudge the back of his throat, eyes still closed in an expression of some sort of beatific satisfaction. He gags, choking, and Mike tightens the hand in his hair, meaning to coax him into going easier on himself, but Bill moans around him and pushes against it, taking more of him. Mike realises what it is that he wants and slips his fingers into Bill’s hair.

“Bill,” Mike says, because he wants to tell him it’s enough, it’s more than he ever expected, but Bill opens his eyes and looks up at him with such open need, like this is something he has to have and he’s asking Mike to let him take care of it. Mike lifts his other hand to the side of Bill’s face, lays his thumb against Bill’s damp cheek. He can feel himself there; feel Bill swallowing around him. It’s too much: Bill pulls back to mouth at the head, one hand wet with saliva working the base of him, and Mike grunts involuntarily, fingers clenching in Bill’s hair in warning. Bill glances up at him and takes him deeper, letting the weight of him pulse against his tongue.

Mike comes harder than he can ever remember coming in his life, jerking against Bill’s grip and staring, wide-eyed at the way Bill’s eyes slip closed and he takes it, letting Mike tremble and jerk against him. Bill’s got the heel of one hand pressed to the front of his own jeans. His throat works, swallowing Mike down, and then he’s panting, resting his forehead against Mike’s thigh, letting Mike slip wetly from his mouth.

Mike doesn’t know what to say. His dick’s twitching against his thigh and Bill’s ragged breath is loud and obscene.

After long moments in which Mike’s heart thunders in his chest, Bill urges him off the counter and tugs his underwear over his hips, tucking him back into his boxers. He pulls up Mike’s jeans, drops a kiss to the bare skin just above the waistband of his shorts, and gets unsteadily to his feet, wincing as his knees crack. His hands are still on Mike’s hips, one thumb stroking the spot he just kissed. 

“So,” Bill says, and his voice is hoarse. “Thanks.”

“I think that’s my line,” Mike murmurs. He reaches for the button of Bill's jeans, but Bill edges out of his reach, mouth twisting into a rueful smile. 

“No need,” he says. “Already took care of it.”

Mike thinks about Bill’s hand on the front of his jeans, his palm pressed into the denim, that blissed-out look on his face while he took Mike deep enough to nudge the back of his throat. “Jesus, Bill.” 

Bill licks the corner of his mouth, looking uncertain and pleased with himself, so Mike kisses him, scooping one arm behind him to hold him close. His mouth tastes of Mike’s come: this is something filthier than anything Mike ever conjured up, the times he let himself think about what it might be like, to share this with another person. Bill makes a sound around his tongue, pushing it into his mouth, and clutches at him, his hands fisted in Mike’s shirt.

They’re interrupted by the sound of Bill’s phone vibrating on the counter. 

“Ignore it,” Bill mutters, hoarse, when Mike draws away to let him answer. He’s got both hands in Mike’s hair and he tugs him down to lick into his mouth again.

A minute later, the phone vibrates against the counter a second time and Bill groans, resting his head against Mike’s shoulder. “Fuck, Mikey, I’m sorry -“

“It’s ok,” Mike murmurs into his hair. “Could be important."

Bill's voice when he answers the phone is admirably steady. Mike wonders how he manages it, when he feels like he might not remember his own name. “Bill Denbrough. Sure, sure - just, give me a minute, I’ll look it up.”

 _Do you mind?_ he mouths, and Mike shakes his head, gesturing for him to go. He flashes an apologetic look over his shoulder as he disappears in the direction of the study. 

Mike takes a deep breath and looks out of the kitchen window. His jeans are still open, his cock damp in his boxers; he doesn’t envy Bill, sitting through a business call without the chance to clean up first. The thought of what just happened - that Bill came in his pants because he - just because Mike - the thought is too much, it’s like his mind keeps pinging away from it like the pinballs in the machines at the Capitol Theater. He feels like he ought to be embarrassed and instead he feels nothing but a quiet kind of euphoria. He gathers up Bill’s cold coffee and empties it into the sink, setting the machine to brew a fresh pot. He should eat, and Bill’s taken out bread to go under the grill, but the memory of the bourbon and the nightmares make his stomach lurch in warning.

With the evidence of their aborted breakfast cleared away, he sits down at the counter and takes out his phone to skim the group chat. It moves at too fast a pace for him to keep up, so he usually settles for letting the others throw gifs and emojis at one another, selfies of Ben’s dog and Eddie with his new apartment keys, then when it’s something significant, he sends over a sincere congratulations or commiseration. It’s been good, lately, just to bask in the reflected warmth of their interactions. 

_When do we get the tour?_ Bill had asked, earlier that morning, and Eddie had replied: _FaceTime - 11.30?_

Mike considers letting the others know he’s here, but Bill hasn’t, and he’s somehow reluctant, as though mentioning it will shine a light on something he isn’t yet ready to offer for examination. Beverly, with her lovely, sad smile when she hugged him goodbye, would be so pleased, and yet he can’t bring himself to type the words. What would he say, in any case, that Bev wouldn’t see straight through? _I got lost on the way to Florida and ended up on the wrong coast?_

He treads lightly down the tiled hallway floor on his way to retrieve _Neuromancer_ , Bill’s voice a low rumble behind the closed door of the study.

He emerges half an hour later, smiling when he sees Mike installed in the armchair with the book propped open on his knee. “Eddie’s calling, he’s gonna show off the apartment."

Mike hesitates, finger paused in the act of folding over a page corner. “Do you mind if he knows I’m here?”

“There’s no reason you shouldn’t be,” Bill says, shrugging. “Unless you -“

“No, no, it’s fine.” Mike marks his place and sets the book down, unfolding himself from the armchair. “I’m coming.”

Eddie is on the other side of the Mac screen on Bill’s desk, his eyes crinkled at the corners, smile wider than Mike remembers seeing the whole time they were in Derry. “Mike!” He cheers, when Mike ducks down to put his face in the camera’s line of vision. “Good to see you, man!”

“You too. How’s the apartment?”

Eddie’s smile broadens impossibly, his face all dimples and creases, and he falls into a rambling description of how wild it feels not to own a single piece of his own furniture. Mike takes the time to study him, the way his cheek has started to scar pink and tight and he’s waving his arm, still in its cast, wide enough that Mike’s concerned he’ll do himself further injury. He looks tired, Mike thinks, but don’t they all? He looks contented, too, and that’s the more important thing to note.

“Mikey,” Bill murmurs, glancing at him while Eddie raises his phone to show them a view of his living room, “there’s space -“

He’s shifted over on his chair and is looking at Mike expectantly. It’s ridiculous; even as kids they’d have struggled to fit, but Bill raises his eyebrows and Mike perches willingly in the space he’s made. It’s more an elaborate work-out manoeuvre, his thighs doing most of the work to prevent him landing on the floor, but Bill’s pressed warm and comfortable all down one side. Mike’s sure Eddie must be able to see his flushed cheeks, the embarrassed slide of his gaze away from the sight of Bill’s knee jostling his own.

Eddie says nothing. He takes them on a tour of the apartment, points out the Manhattan Bridge, which can be glimpsed in the distance in the gap between apartment buildings. If he glances shrewdly at Bill’s left hand, the empty space where his wedding ring used to sit, he makes nothing of it. Mike’s grateful. He feels obvious and raw, especially when Bill says, carefully: “Is Richie…?”

“Who knows what the fuck Richie is,” Eddie snaps, rolling his eyes extravagantly, the corners of his mouth making a brief unhappy curve, before he’s changing the subject and telling them about the gym in the basement, how he’s still got weeks before he can have the cast removed and make proper use of it.

They say goodbye with promises of visits in the near future and Bill puts his hand briefly on Mike’s thigh as he gets to his feet. “Can you ever remember him smiling that much?”

“Suits him,” Mike says, and Bill smiles at him, brushing Mike’s fingers with his own before he glances ruefully down at his jeans.

“I, uh. I’m gonna go change; wanna see what you want for lunch? We can go out, if you want to get out of the house.”

“I’m good,” Mike says. “Go; I’ll see what’s in the fridge.”

Bill smiles at him again, his eyes lingering on his face for a long moment. It’s like he’s turning over a question or a declaration, weighing up whether to spit it out, but he disappears in the direction of the master bedroom without a word.

Mike’s staring into the enormous fridge wondering whether another omelet might settle his stomach when he realises Bill’s been gone a while. It isn’t his business: Bill can take as long to change in his own home as he likes. But there’s that thread between them, between all of them, that pulses with the need to keep one another safe. There’s silence where there ought to be conversation, absence where Bill ought to be in his peripheral vision. After long moments of pretending to himself that he can ignore it, he abandons the contents of the fridge and heads into the hallway.

The door to the master bedroom is ajar and Bill’s standing in his boxers in front of the dresser, a fresh pair of jeans clutched loosely in front of him. Mike knocks so as not to startle him.

“Everything okay?”

Bill starts, glancing up at him, a frown creasing his forehead. “You remember when Richie moved to Vermont?”

“Tenth grade. I remember.”

“You remember how Eddie was, afterwards?"

Mike does remember. He recalls exactly how Eddie had stuck to the three of them - he, Bill and Stan - with a kind of manic desperation, in the months after Richie’s mom and dad drove him out of Derry. He remembers Eddie’s face screwed up with furious tears after Bill finally took Richie’s cassette of songs he recorded off the radio out of the boombox in the Clubhouse. Stan had wrapped an arm around Eddie’s shoulders and let him spit and curse through his tears, making wide eyes at Mike over the top of Eddie's head, while Bill stood there, Richie’s tape dangling from his fingers, mouth open in surprise. 

In hindsight, Mike realises that what had been obvious to he and Stan had, perhaps, not been quite so apparent to their erstwhile leader. Uncharitably, he wonders whether Bill had ever realised the various ways their affectations had fallen over the years. He’d been hung up about Bev, that was for sure, but it had probably never occurred to him to wonder why each of them had deferred to him; why each of them had, in their own way, adored him. He’d perhaps never noticed when Eddie stopped hanging on his every word and instead started following Richie around the room with his eyes, the way Richie pranced and preened for it and only ever got serious and quiet when it was Eddie who needed help. It’s not unreasonable to assume that Bill will ask about back then, and want Mike to be able to quantify his feelings. 

Bill’s still gazing at the contents of the dresser like he no longer recognises them, as though the interaction with Eddie has knocked him off balance.

“Listen,” Mike says. “I’m gonna - Is it cool if I head out for a walk?”

Bill starts, frowning at Mike like he’s suggested jumping off a cliff. “A walk?”

“Yeah, clear my head, you know. Just - there must be some great trails round here.”

“Sure, there are. I can show you -“

“It’s fine, I just need some air. I promise not to get lost."

“Yeah, of course. If you head right out the driveway, you’ll get to a couple of trailheads. Just, uh, keep an eye out for mountain lions.” It might have been a joke, but for the tight way Bill throws it between them, like he’d tried to keep it behind his teeth and couldn’t manage it. 

“Lions? Like, pumas?"

“It’s not a big deal, there haven’t been any attacks recently. Just be careful, you know.” Bill’s knuckles are white, the jeans crumpled in his fist, and his gaze is darting around Mike’s face, refusing to settle, that stubborn, awkward twist to the corner of his mouth. "Don’t - don’t get c-complacent.”

“Okay,” Mike says, slowly. “Anything else I need to bear in mind?”

Bill eyes flicker to meet his. “Don’t go off the trail,” he says. “If one of them - if you see one, no running or turning your back. I’ve got some bear spray somewhere.“

“Do you want me to take it?”

“Y-yes,” Bill says, definitively, looking relieved. He leads Mike through to the kitchen, where he rummages in a drawer before handing Mike a small spray bottle with a picture of a grizzly bear on its label. 

“I’ll be fine,” he says, as Bill lays it in his palm. “Just need some sky.”

“I know.”

“Would you rather I stayed?”

“F-fuck’s sake, Mikey. _L-lions_. It’s a tiny possibility, and you just want to take a goddamn walk. Don’t... don’t let this b-bullshit stop you.”

Mike wants to sit him down and unpick all the things encompassed by ’this bullshit’, but Bill’s looking like the next words that fall out of his mouth are going to be jagged and frightened things, and like the thing he wants least of all is for it to happen with Mike as a witness. Mike understands that: he thinks about that moment of shame in the sewers, when It had laid his lies bare, and the way he would have done anything to have had that conversation with the others when he hadn’t sounded so desperate and unhinged.

“Give me an hour,” he says, quietly.

Bill nods and Mike makes his escape while his legs are still capable of carrying him in the opposite direction. He turns right at the end of the driveway, uphill, into the sun.

He checks his watch religiously, not wanting to risk being late and causing Bill to worry. The trail above the house leads off the road and winds through cedars to a ridge of exposed rocks. There’s a view of the valley falling away to one side: he can see the vineyard Bill had mentioned, undulating rows of vines that look as though someone took a giant comb to the waves of a vast, verdant ocean. It puts him in mind of Homer’s _wine-dark sea_ , the recognition he’d felt for lonely Odysseus when he’d pushed himself through Fitzgerald’s _Odyssey_ in the depths of his first year alone in Derry, after Eddie’s mom had finally taken him to Portland like she’d threatened, and Bill and Stan had departed for college. _Wine-dark_ ; meaning _wine-eyed_ , drunken, rough; or _wine-dark_ , how Cicero described the purple sea cut by the stroke of an oar. Mike had read and read, idly debating sending off his application for Howard or UMaine, working as the Librarian’s assistant, until one day Boss Hawkins of the Sheriff’s department had walked up to the loans desk with his hat in his hands and told Mike his grandpa had been found dead behind the wheel of his pickup truck. 

He pauses beneath a blue gum eucalyptus, one hand on its peeling paper bark, takes deep breaths of air heavy with fragrance. Cicadas are whirring, filling his head with their cacophony, and he’s grateful for an excuse not to think for a while.

* * *

When Mike returns to the house, it’s quiet and cool. He strips off his sweat-stained shirt and swaps it for a clean one before checking Bill’s study, finding it empty. He checks the bedroom, calling Bill’s name softly and feeling foolish when he receives no reply. Finally, he follows the sound of the cicadas and heads out into the garden. Bill's sitting on a chair on the terrace, his back to the house, a large glass of whiskey on the table in front of him. His head’s hanging low between his shoulders and Mike can’t see his face at all.

“Hey, man. You good?” Mike asks gently, slipping out the folding door to join him, the tiles warm beneath his bare feet.

Bill gives a rough laugh. “No. Are you?”

Mike sinks into the chair opposite. “Probably not,” he concedes. “Hey, no lions, though."

“I’m sorry,” Bill says, thumbs in the corners of his eyes. “It’s completely _f-fucking_ illogical.”

“I get it,” Mike says, because he does. “Panic attacks, right? How long?”

Bill laughs hollowly. “Since you called me and asked me to come home? Mikey - shit, I’m sorry, that’s not fair.”

“I used to get them, when you’d all gone and Grandpa’d died. When I thought about you not coming back. I tried to leave town a few times, but then I just sat there at the side of the road on the bridge over the Penobscot. All I wanted was to give it up for a couple days.”

Bill bows his head, and Mike reaches out to steady him, slipping his hand over Bill’s bare arm, letting the warmth grow between them.

“You want to eat?” he asks, in the end, because Bill’s had nothing but whiskey since breakfast and his own stomach’s beginning to complain.

* * *

That night, they sit on the terrace with the bottle of whiskey between them. Bill’s lit the charcoal in the fire pit, the study window is cracked open and Bill's expensive sound system is murmuring Miles Davis into the sticky twilight. 

“You think Eddie’s ok?” Bill asks, his voice warm and low.

“He seems happy,” Mike ventures. He thinks of the way Eddie’s whole face had crumbled when Bill had asked about Richie and revises his opinion: “Happier.”

“Have you heard from Richie?” Bill asks, clearly dwelling on the same thing.

“Not since he drew a dick on my photo on the WhatsApp."

Bill snorts. “Yeah, me either. I think he’s talking to Bev.”

“As long as he’s talking to someone.” Mike tilts his glass, watching the whiskey move within it. “You know I’m gay, right?” 

Bill glances at him. “Okay.”

“And you…” Mike begins. He wishes Bill would take pity on him, but he waits and makes Mike clarify: “Before Audra -“

“I know who I am, Mikey. This isn’t that.”

Mike sits back. He’s had the self-knowledge of what and who he is since he can barely remember, but he’s never stated it so boldly. Who would he have stated it to? 

“So, how did you stop yourself freaking out, after we were all gone?” Bill asks, after a long pause, in which the whiskey and the music and the sweetness in the air have almost lulled Mike to sleep.

“You want the honest answer, or the easy one? Meditation. Bourbon when I can’t sleep. And honestly, it hasn’t stopped, I’ve just had a lot of practice at controlling it.”

“If you’d asked me three weeks ago, I would have said I wasn’t afraid of anything,” Bill says, sounding ragged and at sea. “Sharks, maybe. Heights. But since everything came b-back - "

“I’m never gonna be the person to tell you it’s not valid,” Mike says. “I know; I’ve been through it. But, if it helps at all… you saved me. I was standing there in front of It, and it was like I could see It getting ready to drive that thing straight through me, and I just - I would have let It do it. In that moment, when I thought we’d lost because of me, I would have let It kill me.”

“Mikey, no -“

“I’m so fucking glad you saved me when I couldn’t do it myself.”

“Jesus.” Bill lets out a breath that sounds as though it’s been squeezed out of him and scrubs a hand over his face. He’s blinking rapidly at the fire and his cheeks are wet.

Mike watches the flames lick around the coals, cinders ascending and dancing above them in the heat. On the farm there had been fireflies that danced in the cornfields in the middle of summer; remembering it makes him want to return there, to those afternoons when Bill cycled out and spent a couple hours shovelling shit, or sat beside Mike on the gate by the milking sheds, watching the light fade until the bugs appeared, the two of them silent and awestruck, bare arms tucked beside one another sharing heat. Beside him, Bill is wiping his eyes.

“Thanks, Mikey,” he says, low and sincere. “It’s getting late, you wanna head inside?"

“Sure. Do you mind if I get some writing done?”

Bill smiles. “I’d be the last person to take offence. Sounds good. I might stay out for a little longer.”

“You want company?”

“Nah. Do what you gotta do; I’ll be fine."

* * *

An indeterminate time later - the living room is dark, when Mike lifts his head from his notebook - there’s a gentle knock at the door. Bill is leaning in the doorway, watching him work.

“Everything ok?”

“Fine. You in a place you can be interrupted?”

Mike nods. He’s been making progress, the story still running out of him like water when he sits down to it and lets himself write. Bill comes into the room, settles himself on the couch with his elbows resting on his knees. He looks up at Mike seriously, like he’s anticipating a disagreement. “I think we should probably talk.”

Mike tucks his pen inside the notebook and sets it to one side.

“I want you to be honest with me,” Bill says, quietly. “I want to know where you are with… everything.”

Mike considers for a moment, because he knows exactly what Bill is getting at.

“It worries me that this is some kind of reaction to trauma,” he says, indicating the space between the two of them. “It worries me you’re doing this instead of talking to someone. A professional.”

“Maybe that’s true,” Bill concedes. “Maybe it’s the same for the others.”

“As long as you’re aware of it."

Bill grimaces. “I though this was gonna be you letting me down gently. Thanks but no thanks, get thee to a psychiatrist."

“We’re old enough to make our own mistakes,” Mike says. “If that’s what this is, I’m down with it as far as it goes.”

Bill nods, appearing to take this in for a moment, then he leans forward and catches Mike’s mouth with his own. It’s an awkward angle; Mike’s leaning into him, knowing one of them is going to have to move, not wanting to move anyway.

“Do you want to come to bed?”

Mike spreads his fingers on the curve of Bill’s waist, tugs him closer, lets the weight of the words settle over him as he kisses Bill’s throat, the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple as he utters a guttural noise right in Mike’s ear. His hair’s long enough that it’s falling in Mike’s eyes. “I’d like that,” he says, muttering it into the warm skin above Bill’s collarbone.

* * *

That night he dreams that the deadlights have captured Bill and he’s dangling in the fetid air of the cistern, too far above Mike’s head for him to reach. 

When he jolts awake, Bill’s asleep next to him with his face turned into the pillow. Mike wants to touch him, seeking reassurance that this is, after all, reality. It’s not fair waking Bill, even though he knows Bill would understand. He wonders if this will fade over time, the joy of being known, of being seen; he hopes not.

He takes himself in the direction of the kitchen in search of a glass of water. When he gets back, Bill watches him cross the floor from the doorway to the bed, his blue eyes narrow and sleepy. 

“Nightmares,” Mike says, setting the glass on the nightstand. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

Bill shrugs. “You didn’t. Nightmares.”

Mike kisses him; he works his way down Bill’s body, sweaty with sleeping in the California heat, kissing all the bits of him that appeal - nipples, ribs, the soft curve of his belly. Bill arches against him when he takes him in his mouth, so Mike holds him down, lets him buck against his hands, takes his time to enjoy the weight of Bill on his tongue.

When Bill’s swearing into the back of his hand and the fingers in Mike’s hair are clutching at him desperately, he takes Bill in his hand instead and kisses him again, watching the way he falls apart, mouth open, expression anguished, like Mike just did something so exquisite he can’t comprehend it.

Afterwards, Bill urges him onto his back, sucks him off hard and satisfying, eyes on his face at the end, like he derives his pleasure from watching Mike fall apart, too; Mike understands that, appreciates the novel sensation of being desired.

“It’s none of my business,” Bill says, later, while Mike’s drowsing with Bill’s come drying on his stomach. He feels debauched, which is a word he’d never have imagined using in conjunction with himself; it’s a good feeling, a contented one. “But you hadn’t done any of this before, had you?”

Mike smiles at the ceiling. “Was it that obvious?”

“Fuck, no,” Bill says, earnestly. “Not what I meant. I just - wondered if you’d had anyone, this whole time -“

“It doesn’t matter.” Mike glances at him, finds Bill staring at him with those sad, responsible eyes again, like it was his fault Mike had shut himself away in the library and let life become a thing that happened to other, normal people. “Does it bother you?”

Bill settles for kissing the curve of his shoulder. “You thought any more about Florida?”

Mike has no roadmap for negotiating the stages of a relationship. If this is Bill prompting him to get back on the road, he has no way of decoding it. “Not really. Why, you want to join me on my adventure?"

“I’m tired of always being too warm,” Bill says, smiling. “I think I forgot Derry but remembered the cold, so I ran all the way in the opposite direction.”

“Ok,” Mike replies, smiling, too. “Not Florida. Where do you want to go?”

Bill considers it for a minute. His eyes flick back and forth over the ceiling, so Mike waits, because Bill’s always been good at this: strategising, drawing up a plan.

“Colorado? I’d have to tell my agent, but she’s not expecting the book until next year. There’s another two weeks on the shoot, and then I’d rather not be here while Audra decides what she wants to do about the house. It’s not fair - “ _for you to be here, for her to see you_ , Mike hears. Bill looks at him carefully. “You want to come camp out in the woods with me? We’ll call it a writers’ retreat: you can get your ideas down on paper; I can finish off a few more chapters.”

Whatever Mike was looking for, it’s there in the tentative way Bill’s asking. It’s his Big Bill voice, but it’s framed as an invitation. He’s leaning on one hand, the creases around his eyes softened in the light of the bedside lamp, and he’s looking at Mike intently, as though his answer is of the utmost importance.

Mike puts one hand on the side of Bill’s handsome, ageing face. The feeling of unreality, of not quite believing this perfect thing could have fallen in his path, still flickers around the edges of his happiness, but it’s fading every time Bill smiles at him. Bill turns his face into Mike’s palm, kisses him there; he’s quiet, here, calm in a way Mike can’t remember him being before. It’s like they’re drawn to one another even now: Mike can’t help reaching for him, and Bill can’t help bending towards it. Sunflowers towards the light. 

“What do you want?” Bill asks, watching him carefully. There are any number of replies Mike could give, but they’ll all sound just as incriminating: _not to be alone_ , is the gist of it. He’s not sure that’s a good basis for whatever this is, but at least Bill feels it, too.

“Colorado,” he says, in the end. "I always wanted to see the petroglyphs in Mesa Verde.”

“Petroglyphs it is,” Bill agrees. 

Mike falls asleep with Bill’s arm warm and heavy across his ribs and wakes the next morning to the familiar sound of the cicadas.


End file.
